Patient compliance with medication dosing schedules is a serious problem. Approximately 60% of prescribed medication is not taken as directed. Non-compliance leads to worsening illness, hospitalization, irreversible loss of function, and death, resulting in tremendous human and financial costs. When medicines are dispensed, especially outside hospitals, errors in selection of the correct pill and the appropriate dose add further morbidity and mortality.
For example, elderly patients and patients taking multiple medications at different dosing schedules may have difficulty remembering to take their medications at the scheduled times. Approximately 90% of elderly patients make medication errors, 35% of which are serious. Approximately 40% of all hospital admissions among elderly patients are due to medication problems.
Other medications, such as opioid analgesics and narcotics, may be prone to abuse or diversion, for instance taken in excess or diverted and sold to others who would abuse the medication. Groups of people in which non-compliance is a common problem include Americans with chronic disease, diabetes (approximately 18 million), cardiovascular diseases (approximately 58 million), depression (approximately 20 million), and asthma (approximately 17 million).
It would be desirable to enhance patient adherence to dosing schedules for prescription medications. It would be useful to provide a low-cost dispenser and monitoring system to verify that medications stored therein are not taken in excess (i.e., abused) and that vital medications doses are not skipped. It also would be useful to provide a dispenser and monitoring system to verify that medications stored therein are removed by the patient, or an authorized person, in order to prevent diversion.